The Broadleaf Arrowhead (or Duck-Potato)
by Theodora Goss

Oh beautiful! Beside the footbridge, growing
out of the water, are the large green leaves
of a plant called broadleaf arrowhead or duck-potato.
Among them, from the water, rise green stems
called scapes, along which grow its small white flowers,
each with three petals around the yellow stamens,
arranged in whorls along a central raceme
and clustered in a pattern called inflorescence,
like stars against the green. Beneath them float
lenticular leaves of duckweed, like confetti.
An angry catbird is squawking from its perch
among the bulrushes, as though to challenge
my presence in this tangle of summer foliage —
the arrowheads, the dangling orange jewelweed,
the rushes whose stalks, rising from tall green blades,
will, in autumn, produce brown cigars of cattails.

They remind me of the annual transformation
of summer into autumn, and of course,
inevitably, because I am only human,
my own mortality. May I become,
someday, if I am anything, anything at all,
this, right here, despite the annoying catbird —
green leaves and water, the only combination
that never fails, that lasts almost forever.

(The image is an illustration of a broadleaf arrowhead, specifically Sagittaria sagittifolia.)